From: iiitac@swan.pyr (Alan Cox) Subject: Re: Linux on SPARC Date: Fri, 28 May 1993 09:04:59 GMT
In article <1tr1m7INN3la@mailhost.uni-koblenz.de> linux@informatik.uni-koblenz.de (Systemkennung Linux (noalias)) writes:
>|> It would only be useful on slower SparcStations and the old VME
>|> machines that Sun no longer support (since, really, do you want to be
>|> running a PD OS on $n0000 machines? when you get the vendor's unix with
>|> the machine?)
Linux on a SUN3 would be very useful, and the 680x0 channel are looking at it.
I've seen second hand SUN3 systems going for under 100 UK pounds with no
software license.
>Much CPU power for a A1200 but the graphics hardware for X-Windows should
>be better. The A1200 has no chunky pixel modes, so it will be slow with X.
I beg to disagree - most of the hard stuff graphically under X is text
output, scrolling and line draw. The amiga can do this in hardware very well
including doing a window scroll while another process is running - in theory
X could be doing things while the coprocessors work but I'd hate to write
the locking logic for it.
You are right in thinking that there may be problems with speed if you do it
wrong as the Amiga doesn't have a mode where all the pixels for a colour
are stored in the same byte (you can either have seperate bitmaps for each
plane, or line interleaved bitmaps). The only upshot of this will be that
set pixel operations are slower. Even then it only takes 1 instruction per
plane to set the pixels.
Alan